In July 2017, The New York Times reported that hackers had been infiltrating the networks of nuclear power stations and energy facilities in the US and elsewhere by targeting employees, such as control engineers.

As enterprises bridge their adoption patterns for public cloud from isolated pilot projects to fully scaled environments, they're going to need to get serious about adjusting their cybersecurity strategy and architecture to accordingly.

For IT, combining public and private cloud into a hybrid datacenter has always held tremendous promise. Imagine getting a call from accounting because they unexpectedly need to re-run hardware-intensive workloads for two weeks. The problem is that with all the production workloads running and development stress-testing a major application, your on-premises infrastructure is already being fully consumed; there is simply no capacity left for the accounting team.

Recent months have seen a dramatic reshaping of the cyber security threat landscape, according to the “Global Threat Landscape Report—2017,” by Bitdefender.
More traditional threats such as generic Trojans, ransomware attacks, and spam bots have been complemented in a big way by data destructors. Powered by military-grade code allegedly leaked from the U.S. National Security Administration (NSA), both WannaCry and GoldenEye wrought havoc throughout the second and third quarters of 2017, shutting down businesses and causing unprecedented operating losses, the report said.

Mozilla Firefox released an update to patch its open-source web browser after developer Johann Hofmann detected a critical HTML flaw that could allow hackers to exploit the browser remotely. The vulnerability only affected the desktop version of Firefox, and not iOS, Android and Amazon Fire TV versions.

Google is working hard at stopping malware from sneaking into its Play Store to abuse billions of Android users. The number of malicious apps removed from the store rose more than 70 percent in 2017 from 2016 to 700,000, thanks to an improved machine learning detection algorithm for malicious and abusive techniques, according to the company’s end-of-year report.

With the General Data Protection Regulation knocking on everyone’s door, breaches will have to be taken more seriously than ever. At the same time, new data indicates that ransomware attacks are rising steeply, which means neither organizations nor regular users can afford to sit around with their arms crossed.

Bitdefender Hypervisor Introspection recently won the SCMagazine Innovator Award, marking the fact that truly groundbreaking security technologies have started to receive validation from the market, as traditional security solutions fail to cope with the ever-increasing complexity of advanced threats.